technology – Jean-Marc Ly

The Future Voice of Companies are Bots

May 9, 2017 No Comments

We think you should message a business just the way you would message a friend — Mark Zuckerberg.

Bots, simple computer programs used to perform tasks & engage with individuals, are at the forefront of customer engagement. As Mark Zuckerberg echoes, business will need to reinvent themselves to stay competitive, drive growth amidst a more global demand and increase business efficiencies to beat out the competition. With Facebook’s recent introduction of Discovery Tab in Facebook Messenger and the openness of the internet has given consumers more power and choices, a greater voice and the ability to interact directly with brands and corporations. Consumers are reaching directly to companies for brand advocacy, support and also negative feedback. How can enterprises cope with the growing usage of social media and many different channels to interact with their customers all over the world?

The New Frontier Of Customer Engagement

What is a bot?

For those of you new to this, let me explain what a bot is and where do they live. Skip over this section if you have read my previous blog post.

A bot is software designed to automate tasks such as making a reservation, adding a calendar appointment, purchasing a product, distributing content, providing customer service or sending coupons. Bots are designed to create a “conversation” that simulates chatting with a human. Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing systems are used to make a bot facilitate a more “natural” conversation between the machine and a human.

Where do bots live in?

Bots live primarily in messaging apps, on websites and mobile app, and IoT devices (Alexa, Google Home) which often is built around a conversational interface. As Facebook and other messaging platforms are launching their own bot store and discover bot platforms, consumer brands should take advantage of these channels to create business opportunities, branding outreach and consumer engagement vehicles.

Business, Tech, Thoughts

Why Bots Should Be Part of Your Customer Success Arsenal

April 12, 2017 No Comments

In today’s subscription economy, customers have more choices than ever before. With new competing services rising daily, it is crucial to watch your churn rate. Managing your customer relationships becomes even more important. Ensuring your customers are benefiting the most value from your product is a must.

Conversational Marketing should be in your arsenal

Conversational Marketing is one method companies use to build relationships and learn more about their customers. With big data and influx of information from pixels, cookies, conversion rates, social data, there is an argument that Conversation Marketing may not be as powerful and useful. However, customer information gained through conversation marketing may lead to deeper behavioral insights and sales triggers than accumulating statistics from other channels.

Ian Lurie defines Conversation Marketing as a strategy for meeting age-old marketing challenges on the internet. It’s a methodology that makes use of the changes brought about by new, faster, more interactive media, without discarding the basic, sound principles of good communications.

How does Conversation Marketing tie in with Customer Success and Bots? Bots are tools used by Customer Success as part of a company’s conversation marketing strategies. The goal of Conversation Marketing and Customer Success is to maximize the value of your offerings. Making your clients more productive, efficient and satisfied with your solution. You maximize the value of your customers. The rewards are return buy, referrals, brand awareness or product feedback. For example, if a client is paying you $20 a month for your product, that’s great. You want them to pay $20 a month for as long as possible. But wouldn’t it be even better if they paid you $20, then $25, then $30, then $35 a month? This is what customer success can do, increasing your profits along the way. It is a meaningful channel of growth if done well. This is where bots come in. Bots can help your customer success team to perform more efficiently and build a better relationships with your clients.

What is a bot?

A bot is an automated software agent working for you to perform a simple task. Whether it is a chatbot (software agent that interacts with you through messages), UI bot (ie. allowing you to perform tasks with buttons), Voice bot (ie. using voice command for a task) or any visual bot (ie. getting chart of the market performance for the day). They all perform a certain specific task and any new task that are automated through an AI will become a bot.

On WeChat, you can use Tencent’s other services or third party services all from within the app. Whether its a loan or wealth management, booking a public bike or ordering a taxi, you do it all within the app. A bot comes into play to either help you order or perform a task or follow up with you after a service has been ordered. WeChat sends automated messages to let you know that your movie start time, when you receive money from your peers or when you need to top up your wallet. It is all automated by these agents we call “bots”

WeChat offers their own and third party services. You can even get promotions and discount via bots and subscribe to brands you enjoy. These bots will alert you for the newest deal, product or news.

Business, Tech

Why Organizations should choose GCP – A Business Perspective

January 19, 2017 No Comments

Cloud services reduce the effort needed to manage infrastructure, provision servers and configure networks. Today the cloud market is primarily dominated by Amazon Web Services, followed by Microsoft Azure. As the new kid on the block, GCP is the newest entrant to a highly profitable and competitive landscape.

This post explores GCP from a business point of view — what you need know to make an informed decision for your organization.

Why go with Cloud computing?

For a company to remain competitive, it needs to reduce costs, increase business agility and remain flexible to handle growing needs. Infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas) or public cloud services, are an indispensable part of your IT arsenal that allow you to focus on your core business. Here are 5 reasons to move to the cloud:

Business Efficiencies – Freeing your organization from managing a large IT department allows you to efficiently run business operations and focus on decision making that affects the future of your company. You free yourself, and your team, from worrying about how business activity impacts IT.

Reduce Staffing – Keep only the key technical specialization and engineering staff that your business requires, without adding operational personnel.

Scaling – To handle seasonal spikes, unexpected growth, or other changes in traffic, use cloud services to ramp up resources without purchasing hardware and software that goes unused during the rest of the year.

Reduce Capital Spending – Why make large capital investments for hardware, data centers, and staff when you can use the savings for business investment? Instead of risky large outlays, your cost is reduced to monthly billing.

Instant Anywhere Access – Cloud services allow your team to work anywhere with instant access. Team members only need internet connections and authorized access. This means better work conditions, a larger pool of talent (they can work remotely from anywhere) and more efficiency at getting things done.

Why GCP?

We were invited to meet with Google at both their Chicago and Mountain View headquarters to discuss GCP from a .NET perspective. Since then, we have decided to move one of our applications from Azure to GCP, in part to see how easy it would be to migrate from one solution provider to another, and to compare performance between the two.

Although GCP is relatively new compared to AWS and Azure, Google has been beefing up their cloud offering. Not only has Google added new data centers worldwide since last year, they also offer one of the best pricing models. GCP does not require upfront payment or a lock-in commitment and offers discount for sustained usage. GCP charges you monthly for on-demand usage of instances by minutes used (minimum of 10 minutes). Google offers a sustained-use discount and publicly promised to pass along along to their customers any future price reduction. In contrast, AWS offers several pricing models; on-demand usage priced by the nearest hour, reserved instances – a commitment based pricing for a specific VM instance, and spot bidding for extra capacity available. Azure offers per minute billing with pay-as-you-go subscriptions, buying from a reseller, and an upfront usage commitment paid in advance or monthly.

Let’s talk about services. The array of storage options are impressive: from temporary and persistent disks storage for arbitrary objects (Google Cloud Storage), to relational databases (MySql, Sql Server), BigQuery (used by Google Analytics and SnapLogic), and BigTable ( “NoSql” database used by Google Search and Gmail). You have storage options for cost-efficient data storage based based on frequency of use and the geographic location of your customers.

GCP and .NET

Google also supports .NET technologies like SQL Server, Windows Servers, Visual Studio tools and offers a .NET Framework (currently in Beta) of the Windows dev stack featuring IIS, SQL Express and ASP.NET. You can also use Google’s Cloud APIs (with tons of supported libraries), Cloud Tools for Visual Studio and a even work in PowerShell using the Cloud Tools for PowerShell extension. It is impressive to see that Google is pushing for a more robust .NET environment, with help from people such as Jon Skeet and other notable developers. To learn more, check out this article: Making ASP.NET apps first-class citizens on Google Cloud Platform.

Adoption Costs

There are inherent adoption costs to consider. While cloud platforms have common features, GCP, AWS, and Azure all offer unique services which promise faster time-to-market and lower costs. For example Google’s BigTable vs. Amazon’s DynomoDB vs. Azure’s DocumentDB. And for common features that everybody offers, implementation varies.

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”

On one hand, there might be little new learning if your engineers already know a specific tech stack (e.g. .NET or Java or Node.js). While cloud platforms can be accessed in a variety of programming languages, some implementations are easier to use. Google is growing it’s list of “idiomatic” client libraries that are true to the flavor of each language, particularly .NET.

Likewise, infrastructure management operations performed by IT are unique to each platform. Azure has it’s “Blades” web user interface, while AWS and GCP have a more standard web console. As Adam noted in his intro report on Google Cloud Platform, the GCP portal feels like a middle ground between Azure and AWS’s portal:

“My initial impression is that the GCP portal feels more approachable and snappier than the Azure portal. Another really impressive thing is how Google has really gone all out to make their tooling really accessible directly within the browser.”

Hybrid Cloud

Private servers are costly and difficult to scale, as opposed to public clouds. But you may be reluctant to give up private services and storage that are known to work well for critical applications. In this case, you might consider a hybrid cloud environment that uses a mix of public cloud with your own on-premise, private solutions. By moving the workload between the two, you can limit computing needs and manage cost more efficiently. This gives you greater flexibility and more options to deploy data when and where you need it. For example, you could use a cloud provider to host your development environment and less critical data.

An important caveat: While AWS and Azure offer hybrid cloud infrastructure, Google does not currently support a dedicated hybrid cloud solution. Physical bulk data import and export can only be done via third parties currently. However, Google does offer simple data transfer options for business migrating from AWS onto GCP through Google Stackdriver (Google’s platform for managing applications on Google Cloud Platform and AWS). If a hybrid approach is necessary for your organization, you may want to wait until GCP catches up or look into AWS or Azure for a more robust hybrid implementation.

Security

Security is one checkbox that no organization can afford to skip. GCP has numerous International Organization for Standardization certifications for its cloud security. The standards serve as assurance that Google has taken specific internal measures to secure its users’ data and protect it from unwanted intruders. GCP has the following certifications: SSAE16 / ISAE 3402 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, FedRamp ATO (Google App Engine), PCI DSS v3.1 and conducts annual audits with an independent auditor.

Planning for the future

Although Google Cloud Platform is the new entrant to the public cloud space, it offers tons of capability, resources, and competitive pricing that is attractive to businesses considering a move to the cloud or switching from AWS or Azure. Google has put strong emphasis on growing its cloud platform and we will only see improvement from here on. Anticipating the future for your business begins with making the correct business decision. The first step starts here. Why not take a free spin with Google Cloud and see the benefit for yourself?.

This post originally appeared on Falafel Blog.